Tour reveals difficult work of mining coal

Coal miners seldom get glory. Cowboys, astronauts and police officers do, but how many boys strut around in coal miner helmets?

Coal miners seldom get glory. Cowboys, astronauts and police officers do, but how many boys strut around in coal miner helmets?

In my imagination, miners are grim and unsmiling, with futures as bleak as the tunnels they descend into, making the news only if they go on strike or tunnels explode.

Well, LeRoy White is proud to have been a coal miner, thank you very much. He spent almost 30 years in the mines, just like his father and his grandfather before him. Now, he leads tours into Exhibition Coal Mine in Beckley, W.Va., coal country’s tribute to the men of down below.

I took a seat recently in a rail-riding “man car” with about 19 others as White snapped on his headlamp. The car clattered forward, and he took us 900 feet underground.

Although there were lamps in the tunnel roof, the ride was dark. The tunnel is 6 feet high, stately for a mine, where shafts can be as low as 42 inches.

White drove several dozen feet down the track before stopping.

“Do you want to know the best part of this job?” he asked. “The air conditioning.”

This mine, he told us, was small by West Virginia’s standards and operated from 1890 to 1910, chiefly providing coal for the homes within the coal camp, whose laborers mostly worked in another mine nearby. The coal miners of a hundred years ago used picks, shovels and dynamite instead of great excavating machines. Each man was expected to remove 6 tons of coal per day. A top-notch miner could do 10.

Back then, mines didn’t have lighting, except for what the miner brought along. At first, miners brought in oil lamps that looked like teapots, but those lasted an hour at best. Later, they used longer-lasting carbide lights. White showed us one, adding a few drops of water to its plate, and smoke writhed from the top of the lantern as chemical reactions inside created acetylene.

“We’ve got a striker like a cigarette lighter. But it don’t light good,” White said, snapping the striker. “But you put your hand over it,” he said, cupping his hand over the plate. “Shut the air off around it.”

Methane gas, which is a byproduct of coal, can be deadly in a mine, White said. So a fireman would come through and burn out pockets of gas with his lamp.

“Do you know how you could tell a fireman in a mine?” White said. “All you do is look for the coal miner with the bad hairdo.”

To excavate the coal, miners would drill narrow 4-foot holes into the mine wall with hand-held drills. After boring a few holes, they would stick in dynamite, blow the coal apart and load it into a cart.

A few people gasped at the idea of lying on a damp floor and putting your whole body into cranking a drill for hours.

After 45 minutes, we returned to daylight, and I toured the coal camp, which consisted of a 10-bedroom superintendent’s house, a church, a school, a miner family’s home and a postage-stamp-size bachelor’s cabin.

What was most shocking was how awful the coal companies treated the miners. They often paid them in company scrip, redeemable only to the coal mine and worthless in the outside world, effectively creating indentured servitude.

In the miner’s home was a 1937 pay stub. The miner made $74.16 for two weeks of work. After returning a payday loan to the mine; paying for a doctor’s bill, burial insurance and the company to haul his coal out of the mine; and buying coal to heat his home, he had $1.68 in company scrip left. As a result, he’d take out another payday loan to get through the next two weeks. Each pay period increased his bondage to the company.

The coal miner had to provide all his own gear: pick, shovel, lamp and helmet.

“The company provided you a hole in the ground to work,” White said.

Of course, the condition of the coal miner has much improved since those dark old days. White said his grandson now works in the mines, and “That’s all he ever talks about.”

I was wrong. Some boys do dream of becoming miners.

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